For our May “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected Clonezilla, a partition and disk imaging/cloning program.
Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program much like True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps with system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery, and comes in three types:
- Clonezilla Live – this version allows you to use CD/DVD or USB flash drive to boot and run Clonezilla (Unicast only)
- Clonezilla lite server – lets you use Clonezilla live to do massive cloning (unicast, broadcast, multicast, bittorrent are all supported)
- Clonezilla SE – this is included in DRBL, and so a DRBL server must be set up first before you can use Clonezilla to do massive cloning (also supports unicast, broadcast and multicast)
Clonezilla supports many File systems, including ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, HFS+ of Mac OS, and many others. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive. It supports LVM2, MBR and GPT partition formats, and can use encryption to secure data access, storage and transfer.
Clonezilla is a very highly-rated project, and has previously been chosen as a “Staff Pick” Project of the Month in August 2018, and also in January 2010. Since being featured as a “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, Clonezilla has continuously been improved, with bugs being fixed and developers trying to make it work for new hardware.
Hello! – I’m sorry (to begin with). – I “used” to know a lot more of this than i do now. – You “guys” (and ladies) are GREAT! – I DO have Apache Office (also). – I now have an OLD HP ProBook. – and a Maxtor One Touch4 (640 GB) (separate) (USB) hard drive. I am concerned my laptop might die. – My “main” files ARE backed up. – I would “like” to save all of my “applications – and related information.” – I “understand” a lot of this is (effectively) “buried” on my main ProBook hard drive. – Will Clonezilla enable me to do this? – The ProBook has 300 GB on its hard drive. A replacement would need at least that size of a hard, i believe. I would like to “clone” (?) (mirror) my HP hard drive to “install” on a new machine. (?) – Is this reasonable and possible? – Would it be best to buy another “MicroSoft” type machine? – (and do this). – OR, is there another recommendation? – – – I “used” to “program,” but I’m WAY behind the curve now. – GOOD on you! Best Regards, Gary Blessington.